​Parallel computing has enabled CFD practitioners to create far more data than can be stored or accessed for post-processing and analysis, making it difficult for engineers and researchers to gain understanding via visualization, exploration and collaboration.

Mr. Legensky will present:

Techniques and customer examples that show how extract-based methods have graduated from the research realm to the production environment

Our recent success applying in situ techniques to production level workflows that scale from hundreds of cores to over 130,000 cores

The new HPC FieldView software that combines the power of open-source VisIt software with the ease-of-use and productivity of FieldView

Steve will answer questions after the presentation in a live Q&A.

Speaker Biography

Steve M. Legensky is the founder and general manager of Intelligent Light, a company that has delivered products and services based on visualization technology since 1984. He attended Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and received a BE degree in electrical engineering in 1977 and a MS degree in mathematics in 1979. Steve's passion is applying computer graphics and data management to difficult engineering problems. Steve is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and has published and presented for AIAA, IEEE, ACM/SIGGRAPH and IDC.​

Extract-based Workflows to Enable and Accelerate Large Scale Production CFD Steve M. Legensky, Founder and General Manager, Intelligent Light

As scalable computing use accelerates, the rate at which data is being generated by CFD simulations exceeds the speed at which it can be written to disk, transferred, post-processed and analyzed. It has become difficult for engineers and researchers to gain understanding via visualization, exploration and collaboration. As a result, design alternatives are not tried, research questions are not asked and simulation complexity is reduced. The true value of HPC enabled CFD is not realized.

Extracts created in situ present a solution to this otherwise intractable problem by vastly reducing the amount of data that is written, transferred and used for visualization and analysis. In sity methods have been maturing over the years with two open source tools, VisIt/libsim and ParaView/Catalyst becoming ad hoc standards for production-level in situ CFD. However, using these methods at peta-flop and exa-flop scales present the same challenges that most codes face in moving to these extreme scales.

Intelligent Light has been involved in developing and extending VisIt/libsim for in situ and extract-based post-processing and creating a more standardized, high performance infrastructure for in situ integration into solver codes. In this presentation Steve Legensky will provide an overview of the current scaling research utilizing the Georgia Tech AVF-LESLIE reactive flow multiphysics code on large scale systems at DOE's NERSC and the TITAN system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Class Compute facility. On TITAN, over 130,000 cores were used for the solver and integrated in situ processing.

In addition, benchmark results for production engineering examples in aerospace will be presented.

Speaker Biography

Steve M. Legensky is the founder and general manager of Intelligent Light, a company that has delivered products and services based on visualization technology since 1984. He attended Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and received a BE degree in electrical engineering in 1977 and a MS degree in mathematics in 1979. Steve's passion is applying computer graphics and data management to difficult engineering problems. Steve is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and has published and presented for AIAA, IEEE, ACM/SIGGRAPH and IDC.​

Intelligent Light will hold a seminar in Kobe, Japan, on May 13, 2016, following the ParCFD Conference.

The seminar, "Speed Up Production CFD Workflows with Extract-Based Post-Processing" is designed to help those using standardized plots/reports, unsteady CFD, remote HPC computing or large data to achieve greater throughput. During the seminar, Intelligent Light will introduce our new HPC FieldView software that combines the power of open-source VisIt software with the ease-of-use and productivity of FieldView.

This seminar will be held from 9:30 to 12:30 at the FOCUS facility conveniently located near the ParCFD 2016 event and the K-computer and is accessible by public transport on the same line as the Kobe International Airport and the Kobe International Conference Center.

Parallel computing has enabled CFD practitioners to create far more data than can be stored or accessed for post-processing and analysis, making it difficult for engineers and researchers to gain understanding via visualization, exploration and collaboration.

Mr. Steve M. Legensky, Founder and General Manager of Intelligent Light, will present techniques and customer examples that show how extract-based methods have graduated from the research realm to the production environment. Steve will showcase our recent success applying file based and in situ techniques to production level workflows that scale from hundreds of cores to over 130,000 cores.

If you are interested in participating, want more information about the seminar or HPC FieldView, simply send an email to sww@ilight.com. We will be happy to provide details and answer your questions.

There is no charge for participation, but be sure to reply soon as space is limited.

Torbjörn Larsson, Creo Dynamics AB, has an impressive background in aerodynamics and CFD methodology. His track record in Formula 1, most recently at Ferrari, establishes him as a preeminent CFD workflow engineer. He has been instrumental in building up the CFD department for the Sauber F1 team and has since led the CFD teams at Sauber, BMW and Ferrari to much success in Formula 1.

Mr.Larsson presented Formula 1 workflows designed with FieldView to a group of over 100 CFD engineers at the 2015 VINAS User's Group Meeting in Shinegawa, Japan. This international audience included CFD engineers from Motorsport, Automotive Manufacturing, Heavy Industry, Government Research Agencies and Academia.

"Presenting at the VINAS UGM in Japan was an amazing experience. Japan is synonymous with both excellence in engineering and a passion for motorsports. More knowledgeable listeners are hard to find," said Mr. Larsson. "Being able to showcase to this audience how the ultra-fast CFD workflow seen in Formula One has gained further efficiency from the integration of recent FieldView XDB technology was truly inspiring and rewarding."

F1 teams are among our most demanding customers due to the need to simultaneously achieve breakthrough results in a very short time while building a robust, reliable production workflow.

Formula 1 teams demand:

The ability to manage huge volumes of results data in very short timeframes

Ongoing acceleration of their entire CFD workflow

Delivery of vital engineering information to the right people in the team, on time, every day.

Mr. Larsson's presentation focused on designing workflows to meet the demands of Formula 1 CFD teams where huge volumes of data and very short timeframes require innovative and robust automation. His solution includes the use FieldView XDB extracts as a way to reduce data size and achieve required throughput.​

I was grateful to be invited to participate and represent Intelligent Light at the Next Generation Transport Aircraft Workshop held in February, 2016 in Hawaii. The conference brought together leaders from industry and universities in Japan and the United States who are working to develop transport aircraft of the future.

Major tracks of presentation and discussion were:

CFD methodologies and applications

High order numerical methods in CFD

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) and optimization

Data assimilation

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Laminates

Failure modes for composite structures

3D printing of continuous carbon fiber reinforced plastics

I found Dr. John C. Halpin’s (JCH Consultants, Inc.) keynote presentation “The Aging Composite Airframe” to be a fascinating discussion and a great start to the meetings. Dr. Halpin asks the question: How long should a composite airframe last? While non-composite aircraft have an estimated service life of 35-40 years, carbon fiber plastics service life is estimated at around 20 years. Experience shows delamination based on power load and Mode 1 simulations are commonly run while Modes 2 and 3 are infrequently run due to the computation cost of these simulations. Accurate simulations are needed to develop appropriate safety standards for these aircraft.

Intriguing too was the use of SPH for bird strike simulations described in Shigeki Yashiro’s (Shizuoka Univ. Japan) presentation "Numerical analysis of bird strike on CFRP laminates using smoothed particle hydrodynamics in a generalized coordinate system". SPH handles the deformation well but is not suitable for representing microscopic damage as the particles are uniformly distributed. Dr. Yashiro modified his code to handle arbitrarily defined spacing of particles to produce credible results for this microscopic damage.

It is clear that some very interesting work is being done in the universities to develop methods and tools to address the challenges of working with composite materials. Further, the range of configurations and operating conditions will require probabilistic evaluation and uncertainty quantification (UQ) to develop safety standards and design targets for heavy lift aircraft. While the researchers are developing methods, industry is developing repeatable and reliable production workflows with mature tools and technology. Industry leaders are eager to speed development and increase accuracy using new methods and workflows that are proven and reduce program risks.

I wish to express my gratitude to the organizers for their kind invitation. I was pleased to contribute to and learn from the discussions with my colleagues.